The Looking Glass Project

How can we use immersive virtual reality to explore literature? And
what do literary concerns such as narrative, textuality, and authorship
show about VR? The LookingGlass project is a collaboration between the CLC and WVU’s
Virtual Environments Lab. The project explores Lewis Carroll’s Through
the Looking Glass, combining the novel’s richly visual setting and
linguistic play with an immersive 3D environment used the game engine
from the popular first-person shooter Half-Life.

Looking Glass: Literary Research into Virtual Environments

Project Justification

Our goal is to create a prototype for virtual literature, that is,
both a virtual environment that explores literary concerns and a
literary artifact that explores VEs. Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking
Glass is ideally suited for such research: the novel merges but never
collapses physical spaces, fantasy worlds, and simulated environments.
The novel is composed of vivid scenes, mediated by extreme
transformations. The spaces between scenes are marked by gaps and
abstractions, by the loss of any sense of reality or reference. The
effect is of radically discrete “spaces” (as on the chess board which
Carroll claims for the underlying algorithm of the novel). The
experience of reading the book is not one of rapid jumps but hazy and
weird fading in and out.

Through the Looking Glass narrates a space that is unstable and
shifting. In turn, the novel is framed by the question of whether Alice
dreamed the whole thing, or whether the Red King is in fact dreaming it
all, including Alice. There’s an undeniable relation between this
framework and the narration: the events are in some way the outcome of
Alice’s interpretive process, a process that is always conjectural and
hypothetical. Certainly there’s a rigid “superstructure” of chess, but
the role of this structure is not always clear: while chapters largely
follow chess moves, there is considerable narrative development that
does not fit a chess game. In what way is the narrative an outcome of
the chess game?

Now, a first person shooter or ego shooter computer game raises
related questions. The player/user scans across texture maps to make
sense of space and orientation. There’s a sense of immersion (thus first
person or ego), but what is the relation between claim that this is a
geometrically perfect, coherent, “real” space (thus immersion), on the
one hand, and the user’s visual clarification and apprehension of
details and outlines, on the other? In fact, there’s a constant process
of interpreting of up, down, forward, back, etc. Forms of spatial
representation are constantly invoked and applied. While the events of
the game – the game play and interactions – rely on the presupposed
stability of this space, there is nonetheless an ongoing cognizing
construction (“navigation” is still the best metaphor for the process
involved).

We propose to build a game-like application, where the game’s
objective is to explore and experience certain aspects of Carroll’s
novel; and, at the same time, to explore our experience of virtual
environments. The goal here is not to shoot or to solve clues per se,
though there may be some of the latter, but to move through the
environment. Through the Looking Glass is easily adapted to the notion
of discrete spaces of levels employed by computer games, while at the
same time constantly drawing attention to the artifice of this
construct. In fact, many of the philosophical questions explored in
Carroll’s narrative are already a part of the user/players experience of
the game. A working hypothesis: the difference (epistemological,
phenomenological, and ontological) between levels of narrative – between
the frame tale and Alice’s adventures in looking-glass land –
corresponds to the difference between the user and the game space. Both
involve immersion and the transference of the self (the first person or
ego) into the character in the narrative or game. Of course, it’s easy
too forget this transference – forgetting is part of the point of
“immersive” environments – but part of the interest of Through the
Looking Glass is the way it reminds us of this process.

The four parts of the project, as currently envisioned

Interface

Labyrinth/Game Space

Event Spaces

Characters/Behaviors

Interface

We want to involve the physicality of the user, to activate an
awareness of the many dimensions of the user’s physical experience. The
solution, in the meeting of the novel and the immersive game, is to
force disorientations or at least attention the interface. There will be
three choices for navigating the application: a first person
shooter-like interface, a scrolling version of the novel’s text, and a
chess game. (Our initial set-up will follow the chess problem in the
novel, but by imagining a much larger space and characters with certain
autonomous behaviors, eventually other of chess problems could be
constructed.)

We imagine an interface using head and wrist mounted sensors, which
is launchable both on a desktop and a larger projection system (e.g.
Immersadesk). We’d like to integrate other senses – e.g. the user’s
walking as a way of navigating the labyrinth – but perhaps that comes
later? In the descriptions that follow, we imagine the user’s movement
in real space to be mirroring those in virtual space because of the
glove and head-mount, etc.

We want the look to be immersive 3D but maintaining the familiar
feel of computer games. We imagine the space as both environment and
“window.” Towards this end, we imagine the possibility of bringing up
“sub-windows” or pop-up windows for display, toggled on or off. These
include:

Pop-up windows corresponding to individual events (see below).
These use our familiar sense of the pop-up window to convey the many
levels of reality in the novel. All pop-ups first appear with the
overlaid words “Loading.”

The text of the novel will scroll down the screen as if on top of
the visualization. The text can be toggled on or off. The text displayed
and scrolled will correspond to the visualization currently or most
recently visited. However, the user may select the text and go to
particular scenes, which in turn make the viewer leap to a new space.

A chessboard view can toggle on or off. Here the user can play
against the computer. The visualization and text will jump or scroll in
turn.

Finally, a section of the screen show the score, based on what
encounters are achieved and how far along in the level the user
progresses.

Game Space

The Looking Glass world is a vast chessboard, but the “map” of the
navigable game space is as if the chessboard has been stretched,
exploded, with mazes added between each space. A given space, meanwhile,
must be assumed to have complexity and possibility of movement: while
chapters in the novel in some way correspond to chess moves, many other
events occur, indicating a much more labyrinthian and complex space.
Thus, movement into a “space” in the chess game can correspond to
considerable action in the first-person world.

We want to use the engine from one of the popular first person
shooter games, probably Quake or Unreal. The project will work in the
tradition of the game mod, but we want to pursue questions far from the
usual concern of mod designers, for example: How does the graphical
space relate to coding, on the one hand, and to the behavior and
experience of the player or user on the other? Can we understand the
game space as the figuration of an underlying narrative issue? Our
hypothesis: we take these games as vision machines, creating movement,
illusions of space and depth, all through certain codes. The content of
the game is perhaps secondary to this mechanism, though it may be more
correct to say that the first person shooter content is the particular
cultural form taken by our immersion in this machine.

It’s important to note that Carroll’s works are out of copyright, a
major advantage for our project. We can work directly with the text and
the familiar Tenniel graphics. Carroll worked closely with Tenniel, and
these artworks offers vivid illustrations extending the textual space –
the illustrations are a fundamental part of our experience of reading
the novel, of our memories of the book, and so on. The visual space of
Tenniel’s illustrations extends the textual space of the novel. At the
same time, they are fascinating in their abstractions: while figures may
be very detailed, backgrounds fade into lines and curious patterns.
We’ll replace the graphics of the game with the Tenniel illustrations.
We want to start by removing all the graphical markers of the game
(wall, door, etc.), leaving only geometric projections. Certain places
we’ll replace with line-drawn trees and other elements of Tenniel’s
illustrations. Other parts of the labyrinth will simply be empty.

The looking-glass world explores our cognitive movement from such a
geometric projection to a fully realized “world.” The absence of images
leaves only “space” or only “virtual environment,” not a particular
virtual environment but the environment itself (though this can not be
exactly right, as this will always be a geometrical spaces, however
lacking in markers). We want to create a navigable labyrinth without
familiar markers. We’ll use the vertical pencil lines and abstractions
of Tenniel’s drawings to demarcate parts of this labyrinth. And there
will be spaces where suddenly there is vision and event, as the user
moves into the space of the novel’s chapters. But we imagine the reader
experiencing a kind of disorientation and frustration, a looking glass
experience. Alice spends much of the book wandering, moving through a
flowing, hazy wilderness. Only gradually to spaces come into focus. This
is also a question of effort on the user’s part, an integration of the
user’s physicality: how to negotiate an invisible labyrinth to arrive at
a space that can be seen and interacted with.

This question is further extended to the objects of the virtual
world. Through the Looking Glass focuses on spatiality and
transformation rather than stable objects – in fact, foreground objects
are more often than not mutating, flowing, morphing, etc. The fluid
object is the result of the fluid space. Interactions with these objects
occur on the presupposition of a stable and coherent space. The objects
are seen in the stable light and space of this presupposition. We will
also replace the gun of the first person shooter with a hand. The novel
offers numerous images and descriptions of picking up objects, chess
pieces, etc.

The spaces of the labyrinth will be roughly as follows. Generic descriptions are in parentheses.

Environment (empty, void, labyrinth). This is the Looking Glass
world, uniform and featureless. It should look somewhere between a blank
screen and a blank page.

Brook (dotted lines in empty space): These mark the movements between spaces on the chess board.

Chess board spaces (parallel vertical lines): These correspond to movements in the game.

Event Scenes (described below: these are spaces with certain
interactions/events, and more detail than the generic “chess board
space”).

Event Spaces

The game starts with a first-person/ego view of Alice’s sitting
room, in color and 3D. The user steps through the looking glass into the
looking glass world, which is uniformly black and white – appearing
like Tenniel’s drawings. The first space is always the “house,” by
default. The user can then move into the labyrinth through various exits
from the house.

House. An elaborate Victorian room. In this space, using the
controls to look makes the point of view oscillate wildly. Only by using
the controls wildly, as it were, can the point of view be stabilized.
Exits are to the garden and to generic “environment.” Any attempt to
move from the house to the garden renders the user’s point of view
weightless, floating like a balloon. You can’t exactly control it, just
guide like a balloon.

Garden. If you arrive at the Garden of Live flowers, you find that
in order to go forward you must move backwards, and so on. All direction
is reversed.

Shop. If you arrive at the shop, you find numerous objects that can
not be grasped. If you look at them they are displaced. If you chance
to grasp at one, it floats like a balloon. Eventually you find an egg,
and with some effort can grab it. If you go outside the shop space with
the egg, it will grow to gigantic proportions; grow into Humpty Dumpty
(TBD).

Dining room. If you make it to this concluding scene, you will
begin floating and growing larger than the setting. Eventually the game
will end.

Characters/Behaviors

Other spaces are determined by the character present. While the
default will set these characters roughly where Carroll’s chess problem
puts them, there could be other settings. Actions and attributes
describe how characters act when encountered. The appearance of
characters will be based on Tenniel’s illustrations; we hope to import
the actual drawings and wrap around a character in a product like Poser
or 3Ds Max. Encounters below are assumed to occur when Alice enters the
square adjacent to the character.

Currently the project is being developed using the Half-Life game engine, Hammer, and 3D Studio Max. Contact the CLC to learn the current status of the project.